Variety is the Spice of Science: Kickstarting New Scientific Collaborations

Recognizing that the twenty Kavli Institutes worldwide reflected a massive range of expertise - and curiosity - the Kavli Institute Collaboration Kickstarter (KICK) grant program was opened in 2024. The grants sought to spark innovative research projects, and scholarly pursuits by bringing researchers together from two or more different Kavli Institutes.

“We’re delighted to see the enthusiasm that these KICK projects have generated between Kavli Institute researchers,” says Amy Bernard, Vice President of Science at The Kavli Foundation. “We received feedback from the Institutes that these kinds of ‘chocolate in my peanut butter’ opportunities connect scientists with different expertise and perspectives and allow them to pursue fresh ideas together.”

The KICK grants provide moderate funds to support short-term projects or pilots, lasting up to 10 months. New projects have already begun, connecting researchers within and across scientific fields supported by The Kavli Foundation in astrophysics, nanoscience, and neuroscience.

One newly awarded research project is bridging astrophysics and nanoscience to delve into the cosmos’ past, leveraging ingeniously adapted detector technology. Another project is powering a partnership between two neuroscientists to examine functional brain networks and behavior in zebrafish. These and other KICK projects have energized Kavli Institute researchers and may pave the way to bigger discoveries.

Seeing the Universe Anew with Low-Loss Detectors

Cosmology, the study of the past, present, and future of the universe, spans some 13.8 billion years since it all started with the Big Bang. The most-frequently studied parts of cosmic history are modern times, meaning the local universe that can be readily observed through even backyard telescopes, and the universe’s earliest light, the so-called cosmic microwave background, whose glow permeates the sky. However, the universe’s ‘middle age', the action-packed epoch when the first stars and galaxies formed, is much harder to study and remains relatively unexplored.

A Kavli Foundation-supported project seeks to develop novel telescope detectors, based on quantum sensing and transduction technology, to investigate this bookended bulk of cosmic history. The project will advance the state of the art of a promising new probe - dubbed line intensity mapping - that requires ultra-efficient detectors to collect faint light emitted from atoms and molecules billions of years ago in cosmic history.

“With line intensity mapping, we’ll be making 3D maps of the universe's history to get more data on its evolution over time, helping us understand why it's evolving in the way that it has,” says Jessica Zebrowski, a postdoctoral researcher at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics (KICP) at The University of Chicago and one of the recipients of the KICK grant award.

The idea arose serendipitously at a Kavli Institute research symposium in 2024. Dr. Zebrowski, in attendance, was describing the technological obstacles to fabricating detectors sufficient for nascent line intensity mapping efforts, when she got into a conversation with Mazhar “Maz” Ali, director of the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience Delft (KIND) at the Delft University of Technology.

As it turns out, Ali and colleagues have been studying special thin-film dielectric materials that lose very little of the energy imparted to them by certain wavelengths of light. Right away, the two researchers realized that Ali’s technology, with some tweaking and testing, could possibly be applied toward precision line intensity mapping.

“It was kind of a match made in heaven when we realized we fit each other perfectly with our complementary expertise,” says Ali, the other co-leader of the astro-nano KICK project. “Here at KIND, we are at the very top in terms of fabrication expertise with certain types of quantum materials that are akin to the types of detectors needed for these telescopes.”

Ali and Zebrowski shared their enthusiasm with Jeff Miller, a science program officer at The Kavli Foundation, who recognized that a modest grant award might allow these two scientists to pursue new research ideas together. “The collaborative idea forged between Jessica and Maz is a perfect example of the synergy we were hoping for with the KICK program,” says Miller.

Their work is now under way, iterating through designs that adapt line intensity mapping telescope detectors to use dielectrics made for quantum transduction. The technology could eventually deploy to an observatory such as South Pole Telescope in Antarctica, a premier facility supported by KICP, with the potential to significantly increase efficiency and reduce the telescope time needed to gather meaningful observations of deep space.

“I hope this is just the first of many cross-disciplinary projects,” says Zebrowski. “We will learn from the techniques that they've developed at KIND to make better cosmology detectors, and they’ll see some ways of applying these materials in new and different applications.”

“Fred Kavli had a vision of supporting the science of the very small, very large, and very complex,” adds Ali. “Our collaboration exemplifies that sometimes the science of the very small can enable the science of the very large!”

Illumination of Brain-Wide Circuits

Unraveling how complex behavior ultimately arises out of the firings of neurons in our brain continues to challenge the field of neuroscience. Researchers have made progress by characterizing how specific regions of the brain coordinate certain behaviors. Increasingly, however, our actions and mental states reveal brain-wide connectivity, occurring across vast neural circuits. Greater insights into these expansively intricate networks could offer clues into cognition, memory and treating disease.

To this end, a KICK grant was awarded to study brain-wide neural circuits related to risk-taking behavior in a model organism, the zebrafish. Defined as approaching danger for reward, risk-taking in excess - often seen in adolescents - is a hallmark symptom of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. In contrast, excessive safety-seeking is a key feature of anxiety disorders.

Zebrafish exhibit these opposite behaviors through their degree of avoidance of darkness, where shadows can indicate the presence of predators. Some fish strongly shun shadows, while others are more apt to give darkness a go and take the risk of finding food or other reward.

“This avoidance task really bridges a lot of different circuits,” says KICK project co-leader Adam Charles, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at The Johns Hopkins University and a member of the Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute (KNDI). “We can go in and see what are all the things that are relevant and irrelevant to whether or not fish are likely to be risk-averse.”

Charles and colleagues have developed novel models for disentangling recordings of neural operations throughout the brain. In the case of the larval (young) zebrafish in the study, their brains constitute an experimentally tractable size of a mere 100,000 neurons, versus the roughly 86 billion in the human brain.

Performing the experiments at the heart of the project is co-leader Su Guo, a professor of bioengineering affiliated with the Kavli Institute for Fundamental Neuroscience (KIFN) at the University of California, San Francisco, along with other lab members.

“We are interested in the molecular and cellular basis of complex behavior, with risk-taking being a particularly fascinating one,” says Guo, who was connected to Charles through a mutual colleague. Because zebrafish have so many of the evolutionarily conserved brain regions as us and other animals, “we believe that such knowledge is potentially generalizable to human populations,” Guo adds.

Her lab has developed a method of collecting behavioral and neural activity data via whole-brain calcium imaging, right down to the cellular level. Plugging that data into Charles’ models could distinguish how far-flung brain regions coordinate to generate measurable behavioral outputs, illuminating new strategies to treat psychiatric disorders.

“The anatomical architecture of the brain has been studied a lot,” says Charles, “but the functional architecture of the brain, where we know from all kinds of recordings that information doesn't like to stay constrained into the anatomical boundaries, has been more difficult to discern. It's hard,” he adds, “but thanks to projects like ours, we think we're finally getting traction.”

Guo and Charles are grateful for The Kavli Foundation’s support of their endeavor. “This KICK grant provides the necessary seed funding that makes a cross-institutional collaboration possible,” says Guo. “The opportunity brings together scientists with distinct expertise and supports talented graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, enabling them to pursue an interesting neuroscience problem.”

Additional Kavli Institute Collaboration Kickstarter grant awardees (2025)

• Novel Materials for Dark Matter Detection: Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford University (KIPAC) and KICP
• Advancing Constraints on Inflation in the Early Universe: KIPAC and KICP
• Lightspeed Pulsar Tests of CMOS for Astrophysics: KIPAC and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research
• Superconductor-semiconductor Qubit Networks in Planar Germanium: Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science at Cornell University (KIC) and KIND
• Diffusion-based Barcoding for Next-generation Vaccine Design: Kavli Institute for NanoScience Discovery at Oxford University and Kavli Nanoscience Institute at the California Institute of Technology
• Unraveling Synaptic Changes in Aging and Cognitive Decline: Kavli Institute for Neuroscience at Yale University
• Computational Neuroscience: Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and Kavli Institute for Brain Science at Columbia University

Header image: 2P confocal image of a GPCR transgenic zebrafish larval brain showing color-coded Dendra expression depth overlaid onto Elvl3-H2B-RFP (Z-brain); Photo credit: Dr. Mahendra Wagle, Su Guo lab at the Kavli Institute of Fundamental Neuroscience at UCSF.